You've got to respect Today Tonight

In the Plenary session ‘Communicating Healthy Sexuality’ I focused on the ways in which sexuality is represented in entertainment media. In this session I explore how an understanding of entertainment as a form can inform our interactions with media.

The question of working with the news media is key for many sexual health professionals. A key aspect of improving this relationship is to acknowledge our own prejudices. Many health professionals don’t like entertainment (‘tabloid’) media. They prefer informative (‘quality’) media. They complain that Today Tonight isn’t the same as The Health Report. Such a complaint misses the point.
Today Tonight is very good at its job. It provides entertainment for a mass audience of over a million. If we want to reach that audience we have to understand how entertainment works, see its value, and respect the expertise of those who make it. Entertainment has been a coherent textual system for two hundred years. Good entertainment is vulgar. It has a story. Seriality is valued, as is adaptation. Good entertainment has a happy ending. It is interactive, fast, loud and spectacular. It provokes a strong emotional response in the consumer. And it is fun.

This kind of representation is popular with working class audiences. Do we want to reach this audience? If so, we can learn some lessons from the producers of Today Tonight:
• Cheerfully accept that you will be ‘misrepresented’
• It’s all about the audience you’re trying to reach – don’t worry about what other health experts are going to think
• Don’t get obsessed with the full complexity of the issue – communicating something is better than communicating nothing (‘dumb it down’)
• Make it fun
• Master the soundbite
• And think about what counts as healthy sexuality (the place of fun in it).

Media

Prof. Alan McKee

Professor Alan McKee leads the Promoting Healthy Sexuality Research Group at Queensland University of Technology, and heads Research Program 5: ‘Education – Developing improved sexual health education strategies’ in the National and International Research Alliances Program grant ‘Improved surveillance, treatment and control of chlamydial infections’. He has published extensively on healthy sexual development with particular attention to the role of sexualized media. His most recent article on this topic is ‘The importance of entertainment to sexuality education’, which is in press with Sex Education.